Hello board and producers. I am posting this message to hear some of your opinions about a topic I'm giving a speech on for a class at school.

We are assigned to do a demonstration speech with visuals.

I've decided to show people how to shoot video, adjust settings, recommeded accessories, and what you can do to improve your video skills. I've got plenty of topics I want to talk about but it needs to be no more that 5 minutes long. I'm going to show them some of my work afterwards to let them get an idea of what you can do with video production.

My instructor has said he is very interested in hearing what I have to say because he doesn't know anything about video really.

I am here to ask you, as the listener, what would you be interested in learning from this speech and as the speaker, how would you go about presenting this speech?

Well, having been in a speech class myself in the past and also asked to give a demonstration speech, I have a suggestion. My speech was an overall view of production, from concept to final product. Starting from the idea, to the scripting phase, the casting, finding crew, the location scouting, production, post production and editing.

If I were you, I'd stick to nice simple basics. Most people in your audience aren't going to understand lighting techniques, or settings in cameras, or the exact process of editing (just saying you input the material into a computer for editing will be about as deep as you should go). Nothing like f-stops, shutter speeds, gels, input compressions or web compressions should be mentioned.

The speech I remember most from that class is from a man who demonstrated how to wrestle an alligator. He used a stuffed alligator as an example. Very funny and entertaining. I brought a script, production schedule and film camera (Arri-S) for props.

I agree with Shane about taking them through the steps of production, but disagree about going in-depth with editing. So much (basically all) of the lay public's general video/film language is created and maintained through editing, that it's almost shocking when they are shown the differences between captured source footage and final output. I know it sounds crazy but, when you show people a final project and then tell them, "shot A came from camera 1 yesterday on location, and shot B is really from camera 3 two days earlier on a set", you will probably hear ooh's and ahh's...although with all the behind the scenes features on DVDs now, maybe not.

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